DesignCon: Download Technical Papers Free!

As with many conferences, DesignCon authors may post their own papers on their companies, universities, or personal web sites. Agilent Technologies, sponsor of DesignCon Community, has made several papers and tutorial slides authored or co-authored by Agilent engineers available for download. You can find them in the information resources section, on the right side of any DesignCon Community page. (You need to register at DesignCon Community to download the papers.) Here's what you'll find:

Slides: DesignCon 2013: Challenges With Jitter, 3-hour tutorial takes you through the test issues surrounding serial links starting at 10 Gbit/s. The slides cover jitter measurements on transmitters and channels, so you can see what a receiver sees. The paper also covers clock recovery, jitter spectrum analysis, oscilloscopes, and noise.

DesignCon 2013 Paper: Effects of Temperature and Relative Humidity in Transmission Systems Using Differential Signaling. Every time serial-data rates increase, new issues arise that were negligible at lower speeds. This paper looks at how temperature and humidity affect differential signals. The authors experimented using a Samtec "Golden Standard" reference microstrip. The authors measured differential S-parameters, near-end crosstalk, and far-end crosstalk with a vector-network analyzer. As you might expect, temperature and humidity make a difference. Download the paper to find out how.

Slides: DesignCon 2013: Making DDR4 Work for You, 3-hour tutorial explains how to make the transition from DDR3 to DDR4 in computer memory systems. In going from 2133 Mbit/s to 3200 Mbit/s, the window for bit timing shrinks by 34 percent. That makes jitter an even bigger problem to solve to keep bit-error rate down. DDR4 also reduces voltage rails from 1.5 V to 1.2 V, making power integrity a larger contributor to bit errors. This presentation discusses design rules, electrical length, serpentine routing, mask margins, and testing.

I downloaded the paper about jitter. This has one of my most interests, the Challenges and Solutions in Characterizing a 10 Gb Device. Here in our lab we try to solve things with old (but affordable) HP equipment: We have an old TDR and network analyzer HP8753C+85046A testset at hand, single ended, but it is possible to do differential measurements with those old beasts. We made some UNBAL devices, broad band transformers, actually with a 50R to 100R pad. (See patent US 5,379,006 or anything that comes close to UNBAL and matching 50R to 100R differential) Not the greatest dynamic range left (35~40dB) but for signals <= 3GHz this worked out fine for us. For jitter measurements we use(d) an old LeCroy scope with their original OS. Wonderful peace of gear, and much lighter to work with in comparison to a scope with WIN-PC frontend. Our scope is a true WYSIWYG.

You might wonder why we do this playing around with old gear? Our year turnover probably is smaller than 1 or 2 new pieces of equipment (TDR or NWA) , in other words, we simply cannot afford those. But we *can* solve high-speed problems for our customers, we have proven that. (see http://ppg.teldevice.co.jp/m_board/images/wb_ug172.pdf as an example, in 2003 I guess. LVDS was rather unknown by then) Today, if signals go higher than 6GHz I throw my hands in the air.... Cannot solve everything.... We find RF and analog big fun !

All of the technical papers and tutorials seem to be very informative and useful for learning the challenges faced for High Speed Design and possible sollution to those challenges. I have downloaded the paper "Effects of Temperature and Relative Humidity in Transmission Systems Using Differential Signaling." and started scanning through...very interesting!!

First time before I downloaded I had to register on the DesignCon site.